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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-30T02:53:30+00:00

I’m trying to port current WinForms app to WPF and need help with building

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I’m trying to port current WinForms app to WPF and need help with building WPF class structure.

Currently in WinForms, I have one base class (with Menu, Toolbar, Grid and Context menu) and several inherited classes with different datasources and columns for the grid and additional buttons for menu, toolbar and context menu.

Questions:

  • What will be the best WPF class structure for my usercontrol to avoid inheritance?

  • Can I move ToolBar into ResourceDictionary (e.g. ControlTemplate)?
    How to add new buttons or to bind commands to existed buttons, if buttons will be specified in a separate resource file?

  • Any other ideas?

Due to inheritance restrictions in WPF I see only one way to avoid duplicating Menu, Toolbar, etc. – implement base class in C# code only without XAML. And likely I can’t use XAML for inherited classes as well (have no idea how to add new buttons in XAML into Toolbar created in base class)

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    In WPF a Toolbar is an ItemsControl (same for Menu), so it has an ItemsSource property you can bind to your collection of toolbar items.

    <Window.Resources>
    <DataTemplate x:Key="ItemTemplate1">
        <StackPanel>
            <TextBlock Text="{Binding Property1}"/>
        </StackPanel>
    </DataTemplate>
</Window.Resources>

<Grid x:Name="LayoutRoot" DataContext="{Binding MyViewModel}">
    <ToolBar HorizontalAlignment="Left" VerticalAlignment="Top" ItemTemplate="{DynamicResource ItemTemplate1}" ItemsSource="{Binding ToolbarItems}"/>
</Grid>

    In this code, ToolbarItems is an ObservableCollection< MyToolBarItem >, where MyToolbarItem is a viewmodel that represents one toolbar item.

    MyToolBarItem could be the base class, with several classes inheriting from it. Then you can use a DataTemplateSelector to use a different template depending on the type of toolbar item it is.

    In this way, all your user controls that have a toolbar can use the same templates you define in your dictionary; each toolbar is just bound to a different collection of MyToolBarItems.

    If some of that sounds overwhelming, you can read up on some MVVM. It is the design pattern that makes WPF great.

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